Shepherding social feed generation with Sheep.

ABSTRACTSocial feeds are used in many popular Web applications. They let users produce events, as well as read feeds containing the events generated by their friends. This paper investigates the design of an in-memory platform to manage social feeds. We show that straightforward memcache implementations suffer from a low throughput due to bandwidth bottlenecks. Following these observations, we propose Sheep, a system to support applications based on social feeds that leverages data aggregation and co-location to alleviate these bottlenecks. We show experimentally that Sheep outperforms memcache implementations by a factor of 7.